Dispatches from Bethesda Friends

BFM members and attenders often share their original thoughts or research with Friends at the meeting. These can include articles, Adult Religious Education presentations and even messages and spoken ministry from the Meeting itself. We're endeavoring to collect some of them here.

If you have something you would like included on this list, please submit it to bethesdafm@igc.org with the request that it be included in "Dispatches." Alternatively, contact a member of the website team, such as Marion H. or Andrew V.

A Friend's Ties to Hiroshima and its Memories

Leslie Sussan, May 2019

I have been working for years on a book that traces the experiences of my father (Herbert Sussan) in the Army Air Corps when he took the only color film footage of the aftereffects of the atomic bombings in Japan during World War II.

Quite a while ago, I took my daughter to live in Hiroshima for a year, and I met survivors who remembered my father's filming them and who graciously shared their stories. The US government suppressed the film footage for decades, but it is now in the National Archives and the story is widely known in Japan, though not in the US.

In 1995, All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, DC, discovered long-forgotten drawings that had been sent by Hiroshima schoolchildren to the church after All Souls had donated supplies to the Hiroshima school during the Occupation. These drawings had been stored and forgotten in a church closet for sixty years. The church restored the drawings and then took them to Japan to exhibit them and reunite them with the surviving artists. In 2015, a film documentary of the project was made.

The documentary was recently shown at Montgomery College and I attended (with thanks to Jane Coe who spotted the notice and told me about it). The film contained footage from my dad's crew. The filmmaker spoke at the showing, and I talked to him afterward, confirming that he had obtained the footage from the National Archives material.

It made me happy that at least some of the unique record is reaching the American people as Dad intended. And it renewed my hope to finish and publish the book about my father in time for the 75th anniversary in August 2019.

Meanwhile, the documentary is now available online at Kanopy and also at Amazon Prime.

Frank Greve and Jane Chalmers, March 1-7, 2017

When Frank Greve and Jane Chalmers realized that they knew no supporters of President Trump, they were dismayed but not surprised. Trump won less than five percent of the vote in Washington, DC, where they live. So, they spent a week in Conway, SC, seat of a county that President Trump carried two-to-one in a state he carried by a landslide. Their purpose was to listen and learn from the president’s supporters. They shared their story with BFM and wrote up a text version as well.